Dec 13, 2016

Business ties and ethics

We have the first businessman in American history as president (yes I know about Herbert Hoover who ran a giant non-profit and Harry Truman the haberdasher). So all the anti-business ethics that have been put in place over the past half century to keep politicians from stealing public funds are irrelevant. And they have never worked. The Clinton’s simply ignored the ethics rules and got rich as did every member of Congress and Barack Obama.

We have a real problem that a democracy has never had to handle. There is no way that President Trump can divorce himself from his business. His business is too big and too global to avoid a hundred government financial encounters a month. Just for tax and loan protection purposes he has nearly 100 limited liability corporations in his name. He himself could become a trust that all other trusts and corporations feed into but that would not keep him from profiting from all the myriad government dealings his businesses encounter daily.

We Americans should just accept the overlap and enrichment that is automatic. Trump has been a hands-on operator all his life. His knowledge of his own business can not be divorced from their operations. And won’t be. He will keep his finger in major business decisions and has to.

The Federal self-dealing ethics will have to be revised and basically dismissed by new laws to accommodate President Trump. And the malicious opposition party will have to slowly acknowledge that the existing ethics laws never worked. With the Clinton's as the bright shining example of the failure.

Got it? A real businessman, a real man for that matter, can not be subject to ethics rules designed to keep politicians from enriching themselves. We have to learn to live with it. Us decent people anyway.

Comments

Business ties and ethics

We have the first businessman in American history as president (yes I know about Herbert Hoover who ran a giant non-profit and Harry Truman the haberdasher). So all the anti-business ethics that have been put in place over the past half century to keep politicians from stealing public funds are irrelevant. And they have never worked. The Clinton’s simply ignored the ethics rules and got rich as did every member of Congress and Barack Obama.

We have a real problem that a democracy has never had to handle. There is no way that President Trump can divorce himself from his business. His business is too big and too global to avoid a hundred government financial encounters a month. Just for tax and loan protection purposes he has nearly 100 limited liability corporations in his name. He himself could become a trust that all other trusts and corporations feed into but that would not keep him from profiting from all the myriad government dealings his businesses encounter daily.

We Americans should just accept the overlap and enrichment that is automatic. Trump has been a hands-on operator all his life. His knowledge of his own business can not be divorced from their operations. And won’t be. He will keep his finger in major business decisions and has to.

The Federal self-dealing ethics will have to be revised and basically dismissed by new laws to accommodate President Trump. And the malicious opposition party will have to slowly acknowledge that the existing ethics laws never worked. With the Clinton's as the bright shining example of the failure.

Got it? A real businessman, a real man for that matter, can not be subject to ethics rules designed to keep politicians from enriching themselves. We have to learn to live with it. Us decent people anyway.